(Mirror. Mirror. Mirror. Mirror.)
Fascism spawned substantial numbers of Mussolini fans in Imperial America, the Empire of Japan, and elsewhere. Poland was no exception:
Before the March on Rome, the Polish nationalist press yielded a sheer inundation of mentions and larger journalistic pieces whose purport for the Italian fascism was enthusiastic.^18^ Among the opinion‐making periodicals, Warsaw‐based Myśl Narodowa took primacy in delivering the news on the situation in Italy.
Ignacy Oksza‐Grabowski, the biweekly’s leading commentator (and editor‐in‐chief for some time), argued that fascists were essentially active and involved conservatives (“traditionalists, of a deep Italic culture”), just militant and struggle‐oriented (“acting rather than talking”), putting national slogans into practice (“pure sang nationalists”).^19^
[…]
The crest of the wave of interest in the biweekly was marked with Myśl Narodowa’s issue dedicated to Italy, opening with a poem by Rosa di Mario, ‘the Poetess of the Fascists’, entitled To Poland and written “to the nation’s honour”.^21^ The Poznań‐based Przegląd Wszechpolski spoke in a similar spirit; its authors saw a universal message in the Italian incidents: fascism is, they believed, a “powerful reaction against the disintegration trends”, a “national movement which, in the name of rescuing the Homeland from decay, embarked on fighting against communism”.^22^
(The ‘disintegration trends’ in question probably referring to Italy’s ‘mid‐1921 […] class‐based trade unions, through to anarchistic and social‐democratic groups and the communist parties emerging at that very time.’)
The Przegląd Wszechpolski editors believed that the situation in Italy was part of a more general wave that would spread all over Europe, while the concept of fascism described a broader, supranational phenomenon. […] Fascist Italy was depicted as the mainstay of “civilisation, and of social and political peace in Europe”, Kurier Poznański, Greater Poland’s largest nationalist daily, wrote of an attempt at the “greatest man of Italy and humanity” (p. 172).
[…]
In his correspondence cycle preceding the collection of writings entitled Amica Italia, Władysław Jabłonowski ascertained that fascism was an “intensified activity in the area of national expansion”. Apart from taking prevalence in Italian public life, he pointed to new colonial conquests as another objective of fascism.^61^
It is thanks to fascism, he argued, that the Italians have been born anew, or biologically and spiritually reborn (“the strength of a tribe bustling with a mighty life is seen breaking through”); they are bringing about “an act of great importance, indeed a historical act … of passing from a small to a grand colonial epoch” (p. 3).
(Some emphasis added.)
Besides showing us the opinions of prominent Polish anticommunists, this paper also acts as a brief history of Polish fascism, which differed from its Italian equivalent most noticeably through its unambiguous antisemitism.
The settlement of the new concept is well illustrated by an excerpt from the memoirs of Jan Pękosławski, the leader of the Polish Patriots’ Emergency Squad [Pogotowie Patriotów Polskich] set up in the summer of 1922:
we were generally called fascists, and I have … to explain the matter. When I conceived the idea to create a new organisation, i.e. in July 1922, not only would we have no Mussolini programme then: there was no‐one to have even heard about him. At last, I could only have been suspected of following his cue only by such who do not know me any closer.
Never in my life have I patterned myself on anybody, and if I do observe the others, then I do it, and examine what is happening abroad, for the sole purpose of getting to know what should not be done; as to what ought to be done [all emphases in the present study are mine — Grzegorz Krzywiec].^9^
[…]
In his memoirs, Pękosławski referred several more times, with hardly hidden enthusiasm, to the figure of Mussolini, pointing at such occasions to the dissimilarities between the Polish and Italian cultural contexts.^12^ For him, as was the case with other paramilitary group activists, it was the Italian phenomenon that formed the major point‐of‐reference.
The ‘Rozwój’ Society was probably the only nationalist milieu in which, after an initial wave of fascination, the interest in fascist Italy somewhat cooled down:^13^ after all, this circle identified the elimination of Jews from the public space as the precondition for the national rebirth.^14^ In their international ‘anti‐Jewish front’ programme, the ‘Rozwój’ men were one of the first to have ‘discovered’ an ally in […] German [Fascism] and Adolf Hitler himself.^15^
[…]
An element of absorption of the new experience was the ‘pilgrimages’ of nationalist politicians to Rome: starting in 1923, outstanding figures of Polish nationalism (among others, Władysław Jabłonowski, Stanisław Kozicki, Adolf Nowaczyński, Jan Załuska, Jan Zamorski, and Roman Dmowski himself) embarked on regular trips to Italy, in a quest for ideological inspiration.^47^ A vision of national revival reappears across their accounts: such brightness beamed from the ‘New Italy’ that hardly any reporter was left indifferent.^48^
Another intermediate product of the crisis and of the spread of new (including Italian) models into the space of the rightist public sphere was the advancing militarisation of the political language of the Polish political scene’s largest formation.^49^
[…]
Late 1925 and early 1926 saw another inundation of articles, books and extensive journalistic materials related to the political system and ideological project that was taking shape in Italy after the March on Rome.^50^
It would be hard to find an issue of a nationalist daily with no references to the Italian example: without a correspondence, editorial political commentaries, longer or more casual analyses or pieces of journalism, or even short notes describing some selected fragments of the Italian system or Italian fascists in the international arena.^51^
(Some emphasis added.)
You probably get the picture by now, but I noticed…this…while skimming the citations:
Wapiński […] sceptically indicates that the Polish National Democratic circles tend to “daydream … about Mussolini”, sometimes without finding one’s bearings in his political message (p. 290); similarly, ibid., 304.
…oooooookay then.
Click here for events that happened today (July 25).
1883: Alfredo Casella, a composer and Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1934: In an example of fascist infighting, pro‐Reich anticommunists murdered Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed coup attempt.
1943: In another (albeit less bloody) example of fascist infighting, the Grand Council of Fascism successfully pressured King Victor Emmanuel III to replace Benito Mussolini with Pietro Badoglio.
1944: The Axis made Operation Spring one of the worst days of the First Canadian Army’s life.
1963: Ugo Cerletti, inventor of electroconvulsive therapy, died. Although he sounds harmless, he once suggested adopting the Third Reich’s psychiatric model. (See Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth‐Century Italy.)
2003: Ludwig Bölkow, an engineer who designed aircraft for the Axis, expired.
Would one of you be able to explain to me what this means? “powerful reaction against the disintegration trends”. And this “It is thanks to fascism, he argued, that the Italians have been born anew, or biologically and spiritually reborn. These 2 things have seriously confused me right now.
Sure. The ‘disintegration trends’ is likely a reference to the lower‐class forces who were making gains under the prefascist order. Fascism smashed the unionizers, strikers, and communists who were winning concessions from the upper classes, and undid all of those concessions. Fascism also created a spectacle that emphasized Italian nationality, glorified the military, further privileged the Catholic Church, and romanticized the past; it lead to a vast increase in neoclassical works (sculptures, architecture, and so forth), many of which remain today.
In short, Fascism transformed the Kingdom of Italy into a (more) formidable empire.